2018 A planetary turn for the social sciences? - Bronislaw Szerszynski https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780429470097-32/planetary-turn-social-sciences-bronislaw-szerszynski https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/196590254.pdfthere were also hints of another potential transformation of the social sciences, one which I want to call the planetary turn. While sharing some themes with the global turn, this nascent turn is strikingly different in its approach and implications. Above all, whereas the global turn was mainly about saying that the social sciences needed to respond to the growing interconnectedness of social processes across the surface of the planet, the planetary turn involves the recognition that the bounding of the social was always already problematic, and on another, more comprehensive front: that between human society as a semiotic, meaningful phenomenon on the one hand and the physical processes of the Earth on the other. It thus involves the rejection of what had been a key assumption of sociology since its foundation, human exemptionalism, an assumption which had already been problematized in the 1970s by the subdiscipline of environmental sociology
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the foundational task of any planetary turn must be the interdisciplinary task ofinvestigating the planet as a category of being in its own right, and the ways in which this conditions social existence in fundamental ways. This involves moving beyond the way that the figure of ‘the planet’ has figured in globalisation discourses, where the focus has been on a narrow range of characteristics of the Earth such as unity, boundedness, fragility and interconnectedness. Instead, we need a more complex account of ‘planetary being’ which is at once more general and more tightly specified. John’s use of complexity, emergence and non-Newtonian time in books from Sociology Beyond Societies (2000) onwards was a great starting point, but we need to draw in more detail from the Earth sciences.
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a planetary social science would be volumetric, concerned with relations not just on the surface of the Earth but also within and across all the different entangled volumes of the planet from its core out to its near space environment. As social scientists are increasingly arguing, we need to develop a 3D imaginary for the social sciences. John’s work gave some pointers for how to do this, by going up into the atmosphere in his book with Cwerner and Kesselring on Aeromobilities (2009) and down into geological strata in Societies Beyond Oil. But this volumetric approach needs to be developed more systematically, through a deeper engagement with the significance of the Earth’s stratification into different layers and compartments – core, mantle, crust, biosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, magnetosphere – with different properties and stabilised on different timescales. A planetary turn would also be concerned with the distinctive topological relations and thereby modes of existence and relatedness that are made possible by this stratification. Strata are often in asymmetrical relations of dependency with each other, and the surfaces and boundariesbetween different strata and compartments occasion radically different kinds of phenomena. The sub-aerial surface that was left largely reified and unproblematised in sociology’s global turn starts to look different and far more interesting when we first zoom out to investigate the diverse forms of complex order that can be generated in and between other zones of the extended body of the Earth, and only then zoom back in to the ‘critical zone’ or ‘boundary layer’ of mixing between earth and sky that we ourselves inhabit
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a planetary social science would also have to engage with the interplanetary. One aspect of this concerns interplanetary mobilities – the study of the multiple ways in which the stories of individual planets can become intertwined through the exchange of entities and materials of different kinds. Here the critical social sciences can help avoid the unreflective projection of ‘globalisation’ narratives of imperialism and neoliberalism onto an extra-terrestrial canvas. But
another aspect of the interplanetary, at least as important, is the comparative. The deepening understanding of our own solar system and the continuing discovery of diverse exoplanets orbiting other stars can help us to construct a far more expansive theoretical ‘phase space’ for planetary development, one that can accommodate diverse possible developmental trajectories of planets. For the social sciences this is an opportunity to counter the dominant geocentric ‘observer bias’ that takes the specific story of the Earth to be the template for any planet that might develop complex organised matter. Drawing on empirical astronomy, but also the more speculative practices of astrobiology and science fiction, a planetary social science can explore how the complex forms of matter, meaning and motion that we associate with society might have emerged through very different developmental processes and take profoundly different forms...
In What is the future? (2016), John Urry rejected two common approaches to the future: one that focuses on individual rationality and agency, and another that sees the future as more or less determined by fixed structures. Instead, he insisted on the need to regard social futures as the product of self-organising complex adaptive systems, which pass through phase transitions and thereby behave in non-linear ways. This insight applies a fortiori to planetary futures. The Earth regarded in the way I have sketched above – as planet, as volumetric, as differential and as geohistorical – is one whose future cannot be known in advance. However, at the same time, these dimensions of the planetary turn can help us to discern the possibilities latent within our own time, and perhaps better steer towards more desirable futures for our own, precious home planet.